User:Zachman/GSoC2020/Plans

Plans

This can be considered my "updated proposal" where I keep my current plans for each part of the project.

Smaller Fixes

• When adding manual item sorting, drag and drop could be improved:
  • Drag and drop of strips from outliner to sequencer
  • Remove need to hold Shift when parenting
    • One idea: A drop on an object name would do parenting, anywhere else could do collection link
    • Perhaps the highlights that indicate what action will be performed on a drag+drop could be improved. Color, location, etc. could indicate what action rather than relying on a keyboard shortcut
  • Drag and drop to reorder constraints and modifiers would be nice too
• Design for collection color tagging
  • This is highly-requested [1]. I think at least some decisions could be made on implementation.
• Option to create a new collection from the selected elements [2]
  • This could be dropdown or simply the default behavior

Selection Refactor

Outliner selection currently mixes activation, selection, and mode toggling in ways that it becomes difficult to add new features. For example, adding a feature to open the properties editor data tab when clicking the data icon in the outliner would also toggle edit mode which is not desirable. The selection code needs to be reworked to handle new cases, and now is a good time to think about the different uses for selection.

The line between activation and selection is not always clear, and some data are more "disruptive" to activate. Collections are always set to active when clicked, but if you wanted to select some collections to reorder, then the current active collection is changed. Scenes and cameras can also be set active, but it would be nice to also allow clicking (to rename, move, etc) without setting active. Although activation is used internally in the code, we can treat it like a simple select in some cases, e.g. selecting a material in the outliner makes it active, but the term "selection" works fine because only one material can be selected at once.

Activation will fall under two broad categories objects and data. Objects means Bases (objects, curves, armatures, collection instance, ...), pose bones, edit bones, and sequences while data refers to certain "disruptive" datablocks like cameras, scenes, and collections.

Selection covers the remaining cases like materials, vertex groups, grease pencil layers, modifiers, constraints, etc. Selection also refers to basic selection of Bases, pose bones, edit bones, and sequences.

For now, selection will also handle the mode toggling case, but it will be a separate function to make it easier to add the mode toggle/activation column later.

When synced selection was first implemented, it was planned that outliner selection would be isolated to the outliner when syncing was disabled. Now that is not the case, because objects can still be activated when syncing is disabled. Having a toggle for syncing implies to me that one mode syncs, while another doesn't. I think it would be best to keep selection isolated when syncing is disabled.

This brings to mind another question when future improvements are made. Should the selection sync toggle effect the mode toggle column and properties sync?

Links

[1] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/gsoc-2020-outliner-discussion-and-suggestions/13178/19
[2] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/gsoc-2020-outliner-discussion-and-suggestions/13178/22